1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to a method and a manager physical machine (PM) for virtual machine (VM) consolidation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Nowadays data centers are more important than ever because of the trend of cloud computing. A typical data center includes hundreds or thousands of PMs, such as servers. Each PM may accommodate multiple VMs to run on it. Customers of the data center may lease VMs to run their software applications. This infrastructure based on VMs is more manageable and profitable for the operators of data center than an infrastructure based directly on PMs is. A PM with multiple VMs can serve multiple customers at the same time. Enforcing resource quotas available to customers is easier through VMs than through PMs. Moreover, VMs are more robust than PMs are because a VM can migrate to another PM in the event of PM malfunction without interrupting the services provided to customers.
Power bills are a heavy burden for operators to run their large scale data centers. The proportion of the cost of power consumptions to the total operating cost of the entire hardware infrastructure may be as high as 20%. Reduction of the clock frequencies and power management modes of the processors do not help much because the power consumption of some components of the PMs, such as memories and hard disks, is not affected by the clock frequencies and power management modes of the processors. The best way to save electric energy is turning off the power supply to redundant PMs completely.